Nested sovereignty: Necropolitics and the gendered burden of unpaid care and domestic work in sub-Saharan Africa.

Women in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) carry a disproportionate burden of unpaid care and domestic work (UCDW), with significant consequences for their health and wellbeing. This burden persists despite widespread recognition of the inequity. Yet less is understood about how it is reproduced through household authority structures and intergenerational norm enforcement within the very populations it harms. Drawing on Mbembe's necropolitics, we theorise UCDW in SSA as a necropolitical arrangement through which sovereign power consigns women to conditions of slow death by normalising the ordinary, cumulative toll of reproductive labour under conditions of state abandonment. We then develop the concept of nested sovereignty to account for how this arrangement persists. Nested sovereignty describes a multi-scalar structure of power in which the state, through its withdrawal from infrastructural provision and abdication of its protective obligation, creates the conditions for patriarchal household authority and intergenerational norm enforcement to govern women's bodies. Placed in conversation with Nancy Krieger's ecosocial theory, nested sovereignty points toward a necrosocial orientation to health, showing how necropolitical arrangements operating through social reproduction become biologically inscribed as illness, diminished wellbeing, and unequal life chances. From this perspective, the home appears not as a private space outside politics but as a site where state abandonment produces embodied conditions of life-in-death and where sovereign power operates through the everyday relations of social reproduction.